Keynote Speakers

Eliana La Ferrara
Eliana La Ferrara is the Invernizzi Chair in Development Economics at Bocconi University, Milan. She is President of the European Economic Association and of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). She directs the Laboratory for Effective Antipoverty Policies (LEAP) at Bocconi. She is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of CEPR, EUDN and IGIER. She received a PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 1999. Her research fields are Development Economics and Political Economics. Her research focuses on the role of social factors in economic development. She has studied ethnic diversity, kin structure and inheritance norms; and the effects of television on social outcomes. She has also investigated political constraints to development, with particular focus on violent conflict in Africa. Her work has been published in the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Development Economics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and the Journal of the European Economic Association.




David McKenzie
David McKenzie is a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group, Finance and Private Sector Development Unit. He received his B.Com.(Hons)/B.A. from the University of Auckland, New Zealand and his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University. Prior to joining the World Bank, he spent four years as an assistant professor of economics at Stanford University. He is currently on the editorial boards of the Journal of Development Economics, the World Bank Economic Review, and Migration Studies. He is also a co-founder and regular contributor to the Development Impact blog. He has published more than 100 articles in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Science, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of the European Economic Association, Economic Journal, American Economic Journal: Applied Micro, Journal of Econometrics, and all leading development journals. His main research is on migration, enterprise development, and methodology for use with developing country data.




Michèle Tertilt
Michèle Tertilt is a Professor of Economics at the University of Mannheim. She studied economics at Bielefeld University and obtained her PhD from the University of Minnesota. She is currently a Managing Editor at the Review of Economic Studies. Furthermore, she is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Development Economics. She is also a Research Affiliate at BREAD and the European Development Research Network (EUDN) and a Research Fellow at CEPR. In 2017 she was awarded the Yrjö Jahnsson Award - a biennial award by the European Economic Association and the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation, given to a European economist no older than 45 years old who has made a contribution in theoretical and applied research that is significant to economics in Europe. In September 2013 she was awarded the Gossenpreis - an annual award by the Verein für Socialpolitik which recognizes the best published economist under 45 working in the German speaking area. She is the first woman to win this prestigious prize. Her research concentrates on macroeconomics with a special focus on development and intra-family interactions. She has also worked on consumer credit and bankruptcies.